


Debris

by heddychaa



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen, post-coe, the new world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-26
Updated: 2010-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-12 05:34:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heddychaa/pseuds/heddychaa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A year after what the media is calling "The 456 Dispute", Jack Harkness returns to Earth to rebuild Torchwood. It's a job he's done before, hell, it's one he seems purpose-built for. But in the wake of personal tragedy and widespread disillusionment, is what he creates here ever quite going to be the same?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Debris

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write something that acted emotionally and narratively, for me, as a bridge between Series 1-2, Series 3, and what we've heard so far about Series 4. This is begging to be Jossed in a year, but until then, here it is. Feel free to go meta in the comments, I think that's what this fic is partially for. Well, that and the usual catharsis. Beta-d by the absolutely stunning azn_jack_fiend and _lullabelle_ who asked me tough questions and didn't let me off the hook about holes or inconsistencies even when I was tearing my own hair out. (And oohhh I tore my hair out over this one.)

_n. the remains of something broken down or destroyed; an accumulation of fragments; something discarded_

 

He can sense it's going to take her a bit longer to forgive him for this one.

Completely bungling the handling of the 456? If she feels any lingering resentment over that, she won't say, because he's suffered as much as any of them for his actions. Every error of judgment, every moral failing, every delayed action, every moment of hubris, he's paid for with time in thumbscrews. Sometimes errors are their own punishment.

Disappearing after? Yeah, she'll forgive him for that, too. Abandoning her, running away: she probably spat every time she thought his name, seriously considered blacklisting him every time the opportunity arose while she re-established Torchwood and the British government from the rubble up. But he was grieving, and she has too much compassion and pity to not allow him time. Her husband will have said, "But you're grieving too, and look at you, pregnant, and you're still cleaning up his shit," and Gwen (Gwen, Gwen, Gwen), loyal Gwen, will just have replied, "You don't understand."

Skipping Ianto's memorial in favour of getting pissed takes a bit more. She finds him slumped over some bartop and hooks her hands under his armpits to drag him out to her car. Somehow she manages to deposit all his dead weight on the couch in her front room. The same couch he'd comforted her on when she'd come home that day and forgotten who Rhys was.

"Do you know," she says once he's curled up like pillbug on the cushions, a ratty old blanket tucked up to his chin, "There were only eight of us there this afternoon. Rhi and Johnny and the kids, and then me and Rhys, and Andy, and then John Hart. He hung back, but he was there."

He isn't sure why she's telling him that, exactly. To guilt trip him, maybe. Because he cares less than even John Hart.

Ah, there's the rub. Even in the dark, he can see her eyes go huge, can see her baring her teeth as she accuses, "He was _all alone in this world_ , Jack. You were probably the only person who knew him, really knew him, and you couldn't even be _there_ for him."

He doesn't think he's going to dignify that with a response, but then he does: "I was when it mattered."

She straightens abruptly and marches for the door, where she stops. Tightens her hands into fists and stretches them out again compulsively. "Were you?" she asks, "Because I'm really starting to question that about you."

He thinks, _That's done it_ , as unconsciousness takes him.

And then the next morning he wakes to Rhys shout-whispering, "And what's _he_ doing here? Listen, Gwen, we agreed. We have a bloody _child_ now. I won't ask you to quit your job, but _bringing it home with you and putting it up on the couch_?"

"Jack Harkness," she hisses back, "is not an _it_. And he may be my _boss_ , but we're not talking like I'm bringing an orphan Weevil home because there's no room in the cells, so I don't know what you're trying to get at with 'bringing work home'. He's my friend, and he's mourning, so maybe you could try some compassion and cut the Superdad act for a minute?"

Huddled on the couch and hung over, barely even able to blink without pain, Jack toes the line of forgiveness yet again.

\--

That afternoon, he takes his coat to be drycleaned himself for the first time in three years. The girl at the shop watches him taking it off with bemusement, her lids lowered. He puts it in her hands and she turns to drape it over a hanger, making quick work of the buttons.

She returns to the counter, leaning over to fill out his ticket. Without looking up, she asks casually, "Bringing it in yourself, now? What happened to that cute P.A.?"

"Car accident," he replies, putting out his hand for the stub.

\--

"So this is how you go about it then, recruiting people?"

Andy Davidson. His last loose end. He's a bundle of nervous energy, leaning too far across the table into Jack's personal space, fingers drumming over the surface.

Jack just leans back, turning his glass of water by the rim. "What makes you think we're recruiting you?" he asks.

"Well, why else would one of you lot be taking me for a drink?" Beat. "Unless. . . Sorry mate, I'm flattered, but no." He's making a half-hearted try for biting, but it just comes out tired. Like he's only said it because he thinks it's expected of him.

The pair of them take long drinks from opposite sides of the table, like two facets of a mirror.

"I actually," he tries, light eyelashes fluttering a little, "I actually was hoping that when the time came it would be Gwen to do it. So I could rub it in her face. Play hard to get, make her beg a little."

Jack feels his mouth draw up into a thin line. "I'm not here to hire you."

He scoffs. "So what, then? That's it? We go back to how it was?"

" _You_ do."

"No. No. I don't think you get it. I _can't_ , not after what happened. It's not like my ordinary life is just _boring_ anymore it's- it's fake. How can I work for the government that did what they did? How can I. . ." Jack watches him stare down at his hands.

"Not my problem," he says.

"You can ask Gwen. I work hard. I'm smart. I don't get freaked out easily." He turns from desperate to despondent to desperate again like flipping a coin. "Let me prove myself to you. Like a trial period!"

"Now you say, 'What am I supposed to do with these memories?'" Jack mocks, head angled up toward the ceiling. When he levels himself again, Andy is staring at him with a furrowed brow that's more a wince than a glower. Genuinely frightened.

No more orphans. No more charity cases. He can't bear the responsibility again.

"As long as Torchwood gets theirs, you don't care what happens to the rest of us, is that it? And I just go back to work on the beat, knowing that the country I'm serving is corrupt, that it doesn't have to answer to its own laws?"

"Actually, you go back to work _not_ knowing it." He finishes his drink, glancing meaningfully toward the half-empty pint clutched in Andy's fist. He stands, gathering his coat over one arm. "Goodbye, PC Andy Davidson."

That look of recognition, betrayal, is familiar, too. The look of a man too brave, too honourable, too damn broken, to just allow himself to be relieved by what Jack's given him.

No more operatives picked up like stray coins off the pavement.

 _It's for the best. It's all for the best_ , Jack tells himself, ignoring the protests shouted at his back.

\--

He sets himself up in Yvonne Hartman's old office. It's been years, and the building has been cleaned up since then, but he still senses the ghost of her pacing around behind the glass, giving eerily calm orders over the comms as everything around her goes to hell. The fall of Torchwood One had been recorded. Every comm conversation, public and private: every order, every curse, every statement of disbelief, every soldier calling out for backup, every researcher begging not to be converted, all of it living on in data.

Out of all that noise, all those static ghosts, Yvonne Hartman's dying words had been, "I did my duty for queen and country."

He'd had Toshiko isolate and rip the fragment of soundwave to its own file, which he'd stored to her permanent personnel file in the Torchwood Three databases. Died in the line of duty, with honour. He had never really agreed with her personal mission for Torchwood, her obsession with empire, but that didn't mean he hadn't respected her dedication. The fact that she'd died for the cause.

But her Torchwood is dead now, her Torchwood obsessed with queen and country and empire. And now his Torchwood is, too. His Torchwood, which tried, and often failed, to be better, and was sewer-chic and insular and underground and broken and unprepared and strange. It just isn't good enough anymore, not in a world where threats are global and the Doctor is dead.

They have to be proactive. No more orphans. So he's sitting at Yvonne Hartman's desk in a suit, fiddling with Ianto's cufflinks at his wrists, a secret indulgence, and waiting for his second plane. There's Rex Matheson from the CIA, arrived at 0600, in debriefing with Gwen. At 1100 is the next arrival, a doctor he sniped from China who supposedly opened up a Dalek chassis and dissected the creature inside back when the Earth was stolen. Two technologists from Japan. There isn't a hope in hell that individually they can ever live up to the standard Tosh set, but together they might be able to manage something. A physicist from Germany. Two weapons experts: one from the USA and one from South Africa. And a Russian conspiracy theorist whose conspiracy theories are less "conspiracy" and more "eerily accurate and remarkably thorough research on the history of Earth's encounters with aliens".

"We need to talk," Gwen says, and he looks up from his desk to see her standing in the doorway, arms crossed under her chest. How long has she been standing there, watching him twirling his cufflinks between his fingertips?

"About what?" he asks, keeping his voice neutral. He tilts his head, trying to see around her shoulder, out into the hallway. She's alone.

"About Matheson." She pronounces his name one syllable at a time, sharp and furious.

"Where is he, anyway?" He makes a show of shuffling papers around on his desk, picking up a pen and putting it down again. He doesn't look at her, her big angry eyes.

"I sent him to get us coffee. You haven't hired. . . well, you know." There's a sharp edge of pain in her voice.

"Someone to make the coffee. I know. I will, though, just give it time." Was that cold?

"I don't think he knows how to use our money yet, so he should be gone awhile. Listen, Jack, I can't—I can't do this. This bloke, have you _met_ him?" She takes a few steps toward his desk, but stops short. He doesn't look up, but can tell she's still four or five paces back.

"I hired him, remember? I was gone a week doing the interviews."

"Then you must have known! Jack, how could you? He's just like Owen. He makes the same sarcastic jokes. He's just as mean. Just as much of a womanizer. He has the same bloody _mannerisms_ , for Christ's sake."

"And?"

"And? Is that what you do? We die and you replace us with near copies? That Chinese woman getting off the plane in two hours, will she be the new Tosh? The new Suzie? Some other operative I haven't met?"

She doesn't know what it's like. To go through team after team after team after team of them, year after year – hundreds of them – while he's a fixed point, an axis that Torchwood circles, spreading out and out and out across the centuries. Satellites and debris.

"What's next, Jack?" she shouts, and is bearing down on his desk, her palms slamming down on the surface. "Is that why you haven't hired a new support staff? Haven't found one that looks good enough in a suit for you to _fuck_ yet?" There are tears in her voice, and as soon as she says it, he can hear the gasp that tells him she regrets it. She draws away again. It's only a foot or so but it feels like she's on the far side of a planetary ring: a ring made up of Yvonne Hartman's broken glass.

He chooses his next words carefully, rolling a pen between his fingers. Ianto's cufflinks, black and platinum, glint at his wrists.

"I don't expect you to understand," he says, and catches her eye. "But I do expect you to _do your job_."

"That's it, then." Her voice is flat, defeated. He's heard that tone before: 1973, maybe? Or was it 1921? This time she won't forgive him. But she'll go on fighting, go on being Torchwood.

Every replacement is a replacement of a replacement.

They are all immortals here.


End file.
